Due to present concern for conservation of power usage, many areas of technology have conceived and developed methods for conserving electrical power usage.
One of the commonly occurring situations which involves waste and unnecessary use of power is the situation wherein offices where engineering groups, realtors' offices, brokerage offices, clerical offices, etc., using digital equipment, may use their work station terminals for very long periods of time or, due to other duties and requirements, make only intermittent use of the work station or receiving units in a network.
To this end, it has often been office policy or plant policy that equipment be turned off when not in use or overnight when the office or plant is closed.
Quite occasionally, however, the operators of terminal equipment may not want to turn off the power in their terminals when being interrupted or having to leave for short periods, after which they intend to return. However, sometimes the unavoidable absences extend to longer periods of time and there is no chance or occasion to return and shut off the terminal equipment.
Thus it is conceivable that consideration should be given to automatic methods of power turn-off for work station and other terminals.
This could involve considerable savings since many plants and offices use not only two or three work station terminals but sometimes these number in the hundreds of work station terminals.